Chapter 225: Carol's Gift

Ossery was fading.

I hadn't noticed. That's the truth, and I'm ashamed of it. I'd had both eyes back for three days, and I'd spent those three days looking at the city, and at the sea, and at my own left hand, and at the gold tower fifteen miles off, and I hadn't looked properly at the old man with the stick who'd sat in the bow of the Shrike all the way down the coast pointing at every crossroads we passed.

Carol noticed. On Saturday morning, on top of Skerrick, in the gray light before the sun was up.

"Garrick," she said. Very quietly. "Look at Ossery."

He was sitting on the broken wall at the edge of the rock, where he'd sat every morning since we came, with his stick across his knees and his face turned toward the headland. Toward the land. Toward the long brown line of the coast road on the cliff top a quarter mile away, and the lane that came down to meet it from inland.

And I could see the wall through him.

Not a little. Not the way I'd been able to see the mortar through his chest on the first day at Hallow Cross, faint, if you looked. I could see the stones of the wall behind him as clearly as if he weren't there. His road-colored coat had gone the gray of a road in winter. His hands on the stick were like hands drawn on a steamed window. And his face, turned toward the headland, had the look I'd seen on it in the empty shrine before he remembered his name. Blank. Asking.

"Ossery," I said.

He didn't turn around. It took him a long time.

"Garrick," he said at last. His voice was very faint. "Garrick Grey. I know that. I know you." He was quiet. "Where is this?"

* * *

It was the rock.

Selvane worked it out first. She'd come up the stair with her lamp and seen him and knelt down in the thrift beside him, and stayed there with her hand on his knee, which she could barely feel, for a long time. Then she looked up at me.

"There's no road," she said. "Garrick. There's no road on Skerrick. There's no crossroads. There's no stone. There's nowhere anybody's ever stood and not known which way to go." She looked at the old man. "It's a rock in the sea. You don't get lost on a rock in the sea. You just get wet."

"He was fine on the boat."

"He was pointing at roads on the boat. Every mile. Every lane that came down to the shore. He was doing what he is." Her voice was very low. "Three days up here and nothing to point at. And the land over there," she nodded at the headland, "still held. Still blank. Still forty miles from him on every stone. We turned over eight stones, Garrick. Out of how many? Thousands. He's a god of every crossroads in Kethra, and seven thousand of them are lying on their faces under shrines saying His to people who are never allowed to be lost."

"So he's going," said Carol.

Selvane didn't answer.

"Where is this?" said Ossery, to the headland, very faintly.

* * *

I knew what Carol was going to say before she said it. I've always known. Since we were three years old.

She sat down on the wall on Ossery's other side, and put her good hand flat on her own chest. Under the breastbone. Where the seeds are.

"I've got a crossing," she said.

Ossery didn't turn.

"I've got a crossing," said Carol again, to me this time. "Garrick. In the seeds. My half." She pressed her hand against her chest. "When we were three. When we gave back everything Varrick had taken, and kept a little of each. One of them was Nathaniel's. Nathaniel of the crossings. Varrick took his fords in the war, all the fords on the Varrow and below Brannock Falls, so his armies could cross where nobody else could. We gave them back. We kept a little." She looked at me. "I can feel it. It's been warm for three days. Since Hallow Cross. It knows Ossery. They're the same kind of thing, nearly. Crossings and crossroads. Places where you have to choose a way."

"Carol," I said.

"You did it for Meriel. You grew her voice back from a seed. You planted it where it was, and it learned the edges, and grew the rest." She was very calm. "I want to do it for him. With mine. I've never done it. I've only ever watched you."

"It'll cost you," I said.

"I know."

"It cost me an hour and forty minutes and everything I had. You held me up the whole time. And it was a little thing, Meriel's voice. One piece. Torn." I looked at Ossery, at the wall through his chest. "He's not torn. He's gone. Nearly all of him. Everything he was god of is lying on its face under seven thousand shrines. You'd be growing the rest of a whole god out of one seed."

"I know," said Carol.

"And he'll feel it." I hadn't meant to say it. It came out anyway. "Malachar. The seeds, Carol. The stone at Westmere. Two hands in it, one of them his, tuned to the Flame and to the seeds. A hound's nose. He knows where we keep them. You plant one fifteen miles from his city and he'll feel it like a door opening in his house."

Carol looked at me for a long time.

"Good," she said.

* * *

"Let him feel it," said my sister.

She hadn't raised her voice. She didn't need to. Across the top of Skerrick, by the fires, I saw Brisa Thale lift her head from her splicing and look at her.

"Let him feel it," said Carol. "Let him sit in his gold room and feel somebody fifteen miles away do the opposite of what he does. Give something back. Plant something where it was taken. Make a god more, instead of less." Her voice shook and she let it. "I've been carrying these seeds since I was three, Garrick. Twenty years. Under my breastbone. Feeling every god I gave something back to, all the time, like warm stones in a pocket. Being afraid he'd come for them. Hiding them. Keeping them." She pressed her hand harder against her chest. "We kept them so they wouldn't be alone. That's what Meriel said. You kept them so that we wouldn't be alone. Not so I could hide them in a box till I die."

She turned to Ossery.

"Ossery," she said. "It's Carol. Carol Grey. Who holds the other end of her brother's name." She put her good hand on his faded one, on the stick. "I'd like to give you something. A seed. Of a crossing. From a god called Nathaniel, over the sea, who keeps the fords. I'd like to plant it where you used to be, and see if it grows into you." She was quiet. "It might hurt. It might not work. You might not want it. You can say no."

The old man on the wall turned his head, very slowly, and looked at her.

Where is this? he said. Faint as breath.

"I don't know," said Carol. "That's why I'm asking you."

* * *

He said yes. Not in words. He couldn't, by then. But he took one faded hand off his stick, very slowly, the way an old man does who isn't sure his hands will go where he tells them anymore, and put it over hers. And held on.

"Not here," said Ossery's hand. I don't know how I knew. I felt it, the way you feel a sign.

"Not here," I said. "Not on the rock. He's god of crossroads. He has to be at one."

Brisa had already stood up.

"There's a cross on the headland," she said. "Where the lane up from the river meets the cliff road. A quarter mile from the stair. There's a shrine on it." She looked at the sky. "The sun's not up. The patrols don't come out of the city till it is. We've got an hour, maybe." She looked at Carol. "If you're going to do something a god would do, girl, you'd best do it before anybody's awake to see it."

"You said no gods," I said.

Brisa Thale looked at me with her sea-ice eyes.

"I said no gods doing things," she said. "To win. Not this." She looked at Ossery, at the wall through his chest. "This isn't winning anything. This is somebody who's been forgotten getting remembered." She turned away toward the stair. "I've no objection to that. I've been doing it myself for twenty years with a sack."

* * *

We took the Shrike across in the dark. Carol and me and Ossery, and Selvane with her lamp, and Brisa at the tiller. Nobody else. Lexander wanted to come and I asked him not to, and he looked at me with his one eye for a long time and then nodded. Kessavel stood at the top of the stair with Tegen's shell in his hand and watched us go.

Ossery couldn't walk. I carried him up the cliff path from the cove. He weighed nothing. It was like carrying a coat with nobody in it.

The crossroads on the headland was nothing much. The cliff road running north and south along the top of the land. A lane coming up to it from the east, from the river valley, between two banks of gorse. A milestone with an iron fist on it. XV. And on the corner, a shrine. A little stone box with a black door and a rusted hand.

Brisa stood guard at the top of the lane with her crossbow. Selvane held the lamp.

I went into the shrine, and knocked first, and asked, and nobody answered. And I lifted the flag in the middle of the floor with my two hands, both of them, my own, and there was the stone underneath, face down. I turned it over.

Skerrick Cross. Kell Ford, twelve. The city, fifteen. The sea on your right hand going south. If you are lost, ask Ossery.

I carried it out and laid it on the grass at the corner of the four ways, face up, under the sky. And I laid Ossery down beside it, with his head on his own name.

* * *

Carol knelt down on the other side of him.

She was very pale. She's been pale, always, since she was small; Mother says it's the frost in her. But this was a different pale. She took her bad arm out of its sling and laid it across her knee. And put her good hand flat on Ossery's chest. On the place where you could see the grass through him.

"Garrick," she said, without looking up. "Hand."

I knelt behind her and put my hand flat between her shoulder blades. My left hand. The one that had come back at midwinter. With Adriana's silver in it, and my mother's gold.

The way she'd held me, for Meriel. An hour and forty minutes.

"I'm here," I said. "I've got the other end."

"I know," said Carol. "Idiot." And closed her eyes.

* * *

I don't know how to tell what she did. I've done it myself, once, and I still don't know how to tell it. I can only tell what it was like from behind, with my hand on her back.

It was like warmth going out of a house.

Not fast. Slow. The way a hearth goes out when somebody opens the door on a winter night and stands in it, thinking, and forgets to close it. I felt it go out of her, through my hand, out of the center of her, from under her breastbone. A small warm thing, the size of a seed. And then I felt it go down her arm, the good one, into her palm, into Ossery.

And Ossery went dark.

That's the only word. The faded gray shape on the grass, that I could see the grass through, went dark all at once. Not black. Not dead. Dark the way a field goes dark when you've just plowed it. The way earth goes dark when you've turned it over. Ready.

"There," whispered Carol. "There. I've put it in. I've put it where he was."

"Firm it," I said. I remembered. "Press it down. The way you press soil around a root. So it knows it's home."

She pressed. I felt her press, through my hand on her back. Felt her lean down on her good arm, on the old man's chest, the way you'd lean on a spade.

And then she said, "Oh."

* * *

It grew.

I felt it before I saw it. Through Carol. Through my hand on her back. A thread. A root. Coming out of the seed she'd planted, out of the little warm piece of Nathaniel's fords that she'd carried for twenty years under her breastbone, and going down. Into Ossery. Into the dark turned earth of him. Feeling for the edges of what had been there.

And it found them.

Not his name. He had his name. He'd had it since Hallow Cross. It found the rest. The thing his name was for. I felt it go out from the seed into the faded shape of him like a root going out through soil, and touch something, and stop, and learn it, and go on. The shape of a crossroads. Four ways. A choice. A man standing at the corner with his pack on his back and the light going, not knowing which way. Somebody answering.

It learned that. And then it grew the rest.

Not the same. Not the old Ossery, put back exactly. Nathaniel's seed was a crossing, not a crossroads. A ford. A place where you go through, not where you choose. So what came up in Ossery wasn't just the old thing. It was the old thing, and something new grown into it. Every crossroads in him, the root found and learned. And every one, as it learned it, it gave a little of what it was itself: a way across. A ford. A place where, if you'd chosen your road, you could get over the river on it.

If you are lost, ask Ossery.

And now: and he'll tell you where you are. And how to get across.

* * *

It cost her.

I knew it would. I felt it go. It wasn't like Meriel, where the gray had poured out of me like water out of a jug. It was slower. Steadier. It came out of Carol the way heat comes out of a stone you've had in the fire all day, a little at a time, for a long time.

The sun came up. I didn't notice it. Selvane told me after. She said it came up out of the sea behind us, from home, the way it had at midwinter, and lay across the headland, gold, and the gorse lit up on both sides of the lane like it was on fire. She said Brisa Thale, at the top of the lane with her crossbow, turned around and watched it and didn't turn back for a long time.

I didn't see any of it. I was looking at the back of my sister's neck, and feeling her go cold under my hand.

"Carol," I said.

"Not yet."

"You're cold."

"I'm always cold." Her voice was very thin. "It's nearly. It's—" She stopped. "It needs a second voice."

* * *

Of course it did. Meriel's had. A naming needs two voices. Carol had said Teo for me, at the end, and the new flame had learned and twined with the old.

But Ossery had his name. He didn't need naming. What did he need?

I looked at the stone. If you are lost, ask Ossery.

And I knew.

"Ossery," I said. Out loud. Kneeling behind my sister at a crossroads on the edge of Kethra, fifteen miles from the city, with the sun coming up out of the sea from home. "I'm lost."

Under Carol's hand, the dark plowed shape of him moved.

"Please," I said. "Where am I?"

And Ossery opened his eyes.

* * *

"You're at Skerrick Cross," said Ossery.

It wasn't faint. It wasn't the dry small voice from the empty shrine at Hallow Cross. It wasn't even the low patient voice he'd had on the quay at Dunnock. It was something new. Deep. Steady. With something in it I'd never heard in his voice before, like water running over stones.

"Where the river lane meets the cliff road. The river's two miles east, and the ford at the bottom of the lane is good, it'll take a cart. Kell Ford's twelve south, down the river. The city's fifteen. The sea is on your right hand going south." He lifted his head off the stone. "And if you go down the lane to the river and turn south along it, there's a path through the reeds on the near bank that nobody's walked in a hundred years. It goes all the way to the city wall. To the water-gate where the laundry boats go out. It's mine." He blinked. "I'd forgotten it was mine. It's a crossing. It goes through."

He sat up.

Not in stages. Not with both hands on the stick. He sat up all at once, the way a man sits up who's woken from a long sleep and knows exactly where he is. And he wasn't gray anymore. And he wasn't see-through. He was the color of a road in autumn again, brown and gold and hard-packed, but with something else in it now: a glint, here and there, like water in the ruts. Like a ford, catching the light.

He looked down at Carol.

She'd taken her hand off his chest. She was sitting back on her heels in the grass, very white, with her good hand in her lap, breathing as if she'd run a long way.

"You're Carol," said Ossery. "Carol Grey. Who holds the other end of her brother's name." He looked at her for a long time. "You gave me a ford."

"It was Nathaniel's," said Carol. Her voice was almost gone. "I only kept it."

"You kept it for twenty years," said Ossery. "And then you gave it to a stranger at a crossroads." He reached out his hand, his brown, solid, road-colored hand, with the glint of water in it, and laid it on her head. Very gently. The way you'd lay your hand on a child's head who'd asked you the way. "That's not only. That's not only anything."

* * *

She couldn't stand. I carried her down the cliff path to the cove, the way I'd carried Ossery up it. She weighed more than he had. Not much more.

Ossery walked. On his own. With his stick, but not leaning on it. He stopped at the top of the path and looked back once at his stone, face up at the corner of the four ways in the morning sun, and then came down after us whistling something under his breath that Selvane said was an old drovers' song, about a ford and a girl on the other side of it.

Brisa Thale came last, with her crossbow, walking backward, watching the lane.

In the Shrike, Carol lay in the bottom of the boat with her head in my lap, and slept. Selvane put her own shawl over her. Brisa put the tiller over and took us out of the cove and across the quarter mile of gray water toward the rock, and didn't say anything at all for a long time.

Then she said, "He'll have felt that."

"Yes," I said.

"Your sister said good."

"She did."

Brisa looked at Carol, asleep in the bottom of her grandmother's boat with a harbor goddess's shawl over her.

"I've never heard anybody say good about him feeling anything," she said. "We spend our whole lives trying to make sure he doesn't."

* * *

It was Selvane who saw it first. Later. On Skerrick, at noon, when Carol had slept for five hours and woken up and eaten two bowls of the woman-with-the-forearms' stew and was sitting in the sun on the wall where Ossery had sat, with her eyes shut and her face turned up.

Selvane was sitting beside her. And she reached out, very gently, and touched Carol's hair. At the side. Just above her left temple.

"Oh," said Selvane.

Carol opened her eyes. "What?"

Selvane didn't say anything. She just looked at me.

I came and looked.

It was one strand. Only one. Among all that dark hair, just above the left temple, where nobody would see it unless they were sitting right beside her in the sun.

Silver.

Not gray. Not white. Silver. Bright. The color of the frost on the inside of a window. The color of Adriana's no in my palm.

Carol put her hand up and found it with her fingers. And held it. And looked at me.

"Well," she said. Quite calmly. "That's new."

"Carol—"

"It's one hair, Garrick." She let it go. "People go gray." She closed her eyes again and turned her face back up to the sun. "It's one hair. For a whole god. That's cheap."

I didn't say anything.

I sat down on her other side and looked at the one silver strand in my sister's hair, just above her temple, catching the winter sun, and I didn't say anything at all. Because she was right. It was cheap. For a whole god it was the cheapest thing in the world.

And there were seven thousand stones still lying on their faces under shrines. And forty-one houses in the cellars under the Hall of Hands. And a gold tower.

And she had a great many seeds.

* * *

At ten past nine I stood at the gap in the broken wall and held up my hand.

Three and three. I sent three and ten. I didn't hold it up after. Not since the forty-one houses.

But she held hers. Steady. And the city answered her, the way it had every night, one window after another in the dark, more than I could count.

And then, while the candles were still up, something else.

Out on the headland, a quarter mile across the water, at Skerrick Cross, where Carol had planted the ford, a light came on.

Not a candle. Not a lamp. A small, steady, silvery light, low down, at the corner of the four ways. Like moonlight on water running over stones. Like a ford, at night, showing you where to cross.

And then, along the cliff road, a mile south, another. And another, a mile on. And inland, up the lane toward the river, one more, at the next cross.

Ossery was sitting on the wall beside me. He'd come up without my hearing him.

"Those are mine," he said. Very quietly. He sounded astonished. "Those are my stones. The ones still face-down. Under the shrines." He watched them come up, one after another, faint and silver, along the coast in the dark. "They can feel it. What she gave me. They can feel there's a ford in me now." His voice cracked. "They're waking up. Under the floors. On their own."

"How many?" I said.

Ossery watched the little silver lights come up along the coast road, and the lanes, and the far roads inland, faint, one at a time, as far as you could see.

"Not seven thousand," he said. "Not yet." He leaned on his stick, and I don't think he was leaning because he needed to. "But more than eight."

* * *

From Mary's book. Saturday. Mary's hand, small and steady:

Sel's twentieth tree. She says twenty is a proper orchard now and she'll stop saying it's officially anything.

Saturday, just after sunrise: Nathaniel of the crossings was in the lower hall, by the Westmere arch, the way he is most mornings. Edris was with him. He stopped talking in the middle of a word and put his hand on his chest. Then he sat down on the bottom step of the Westmere arch and didn't get up for an hour. Edris sat with him. When he got up he came to the little kitchen and asked for Uriah, and when Uriah came he said: somebody just planted one of my fords on the other side of the sea. And it took. And it grew into something that isn't mine. And I've never been so glad of anything.

Uriah said: Carol. Nathaniel said: I thought so. It felt like her. It felt cold and very kind.

Then Uriah went quiet, and put his hand up, and touched his own hair, at the left temple. He didn't say anything. Evelyn saw him do it. She went white, and then she didn't say anything either.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit the lamp. Benjamin answered. Three and ten from the nearer bearing. Hers, long. The field of lights. And Davren says, for the first time, a different light. Silver. Very faint. Not from her bearing or his. Scattered. Along a line. Like a road. He has started a new page.

Four days since midwinter.

And under that, in a hand that is quick and practical and sloping, a traveler's hand, the letters joined in long strokes as if the pen were in a hurry to get to the other side of the line:

Nathaniel, of the crossings, with Edris of thresholds. I'd like it noted that in the war Varrick took every ford I had on the Varrow and below Brannock Falls, so that his armies could cross where nobody else could, and that two children of three years old gave them all back, and kept a little. I'd like it noted that I always knew they had. I could feel it. Like a stone in somebody else's pocket. I'd like it noted that I never once minded. I'd like it noted that this morning that little piece of me was planted in a stranger on the far shore and grew into something I don't recognize and don't own, and that it felt like being thanked. I've kept fords for a very long time. Nobody's ever thanked a ford. They just get across.